I'm just curious if anyone has any insight on the process and the costs?

There are a few threads in NVG talking about start up poker sites..... Ivey, jungle.... Maybe ask in one of those threads?

Define a poker website? Do you mean somewhere you can actually play for real cash money (if so, lots of $$$ and pointless) or just talk about it (less money, equally pointless unless you have some sort of magnetic presence in terms of being a name player or unaware überfish)

Can you link them to me? A bit of a newbie here. Cheers!

My apologies, like an 888/stars/party type website.

And I would agree it is totally pointless to start up a site doing the same thing that everyone else was doing, but that was not my plan at all.

There is a very unique and underexploited niche waiting to explode in poker.

What are your intentions? You want to start a web site like 888/stars/party....but not do the same thing as everyone else. Eh?

Functionally it would do the same things i.e you can play poker in the same way, in terms of how it does that it'll be vastly different, along with a few other USPs.

Basically, the gist of the idea is the same thing that caused the mass switch over from live to online.

I guess like a lot of the morans in BFI he thinks crypto is the answer to everything

Nice projection, I have not posted anything of the sort, please keep your mouth shut on things you know nothing about.

No experience with poker sites,but some experience with enterprise software development and support. Budget in the millions, not the thousands. You have to consider
1. software development (including client, service delivery network, backend, redundancy and BC\DRP, encryption and security, audit and data recovery, etc), infrastructure (private cloud, or public cloud or hybrid, if private,single datacenter or multiple datacenter, etc.), staffing (support, network administration, customer service, etc), plus, I am sure, tons of legal and regulatory fees and licensing. And that is before you even get to marketing.

Even if your plan is to start small and scale up, the requirements for a minimum viable product here are huge. And you do not want to go live with a buggy, unstable product that requires live money (you could get away with doing your alpha and beta testing with play money only, then people wouldn't lose their mind when your site crashes and kills all the games in progress).

To do this, you would need to raise money,, and to do that, be prepared to answer the following:
1. What are your unique qualifications for running an e-gaming site?
2. What protections do you have in place to prevent other players from entering the market?
3. What is your projected market size? What is you projected revenue? What is your projected profit?
4. Are there any patents or copyrights in place protecting your IP?

It is extremely difficult to launch a new gaming product. It is insanely difficult to do it if you do not have experience, protected IP, a ready source of 'smart' money and the backing of an existing player in the market.

You should not even be asking the question regarding cost until you have answered all the other questions first. Build out a business plan (which should include a market analysis, competitive landscape analysis, protection from competition strategy, and pro forma financial statements), then you will be able to see how much it costs, how much the opportunity is worth, and the opportunity's risk sensitivity.

Thank you for the well thought out response.

This is why I was asking in the thread as far as what baseline costs would be, it's very difficult to get a handle on just the numbers I am looking at and I absolutely agree with you on NOT having a buggy/unstable product, especially when the product is all there is to you.

I don't have "unique qualifications" per se, but I do have a ton of knowledge in a variety of subjects that would be difficult to convey in a post that doesn't come across as self important/delusional or just outright fabrications.

The ideas are relatively unique although they do exist in some form already, just not to the scale of what I'm planning on doing. I went through the Galfond thread and found 1/1500 posts that suggested doing even 33% of what I was planning on doing as the USP. In the long run, emulation would happen, but the idea would be that at that point we would have so much market share it wouldn't matter, plus ultimately the companies that copied us would have to admit we were right and they missed a golden opportunity for nearly a decade.

Market size is the same, it just so happens that what I was planning would allow it to be tapped 2-4x, at least in the area of focus.

No IP.

I disagree with your last point, if I was planning on pursuing this anymore than a LARP/idea, why would I not ask questions? It's not as if these answers are readily available and I'd love to glean info from other people. I have already created what I feel is upwards of 80% of what I envision the site as (in terms of idea wise), however before I take it any further, I'd love to get more info on the costs.

I do realize it's a long shot and probably won't happen, but the axioms on which the idea is built on are rock solid (what caused the switch from live to online), so there's that in the least.

To give you an understanding of where I am coming from, I have an MBA in entrepreneurship, and have worked with multiple software companies in roles ranging from managing support and implementation to product management and sales.

The reason why you do not ask about the cost right now is because you have no idea what you are asking about. This is like me saying 'What is a ball park cost for a vehicle?' What kind of vehicle? Fancy or bare bones? What are you transporting?

There are tons of other questions you need to answer before you can start building your pro forma cash flow statements (these are the documents that will show what money is going to be spent, on what, and when).

With regards to sounding self important\delusional...most business founders are megalomaniacs that sound self important and delusional....and the vast majority of businesses fail. Everyone thinks they they have a unique angle, but usually, it has been tried time and again. Especially if you are trying to raise capital (and a launch like a poker site will require likely more capital than you can raise in a 'Friends and family' round...unless you have very rich friends and family), you need to be prepared to answer the question 'Why am I uniquely suited for this venture?'

Also, the 'land grab' approach to building competitive barriers rarely works. People always say 'Oh, we will grab most of the market before the competition reacts' or 'we will establish our brand as a differentiator'. That is very difficult to do with organic growth. As soon as you start gaining traction, incumbents will move on your market and crush you (netscape, wordperfect, lotus 1-2-3, planetpoker...the list is endless). If your venture proved the market, and you had no IP protection, how long before any of the existing, funded poker networks moved on your market and leveraged their existing infrastructure and user base?

Not trying to pee in your cherrio's, but will really need better answers to....
1. How will we market our site? How will we get credibility in the gambling community?
2. How will we keep existing actors from moving in (read up on "Porter's five forces", and that may give you some idea of how barriers to entry can be erected)?
3. How can we put a management team in place that will inspire confidence from investors? if we can't get investors, can this venture be done at a scale to allow boot strapping (for this type of site, this would be very difficult to do)
4. What do the financials look like? How many users are needed to reach cash flow positive? how many users are needed to reach break even?

It is good to have self confidence and an appreciation for your own knowledge. But self confidence often borders on ignorant arrogance. Make sure you have a much more solid understanding of your venture before you actually talk to someone who matters (investors, cofounders, etc).

I am still unclear if blockchain is really the holy grail to decentralized transactions or if it is just the latest flavor of the month meant to dive the bubble for ICO's. I am having trouble wrapping my head around how blockchain really changes the game...but then, encryption and audit trail was never my specialization.

Good stuff, congrats on the MBA.

I think that's over complicating things, when someone asks about a car you should just assume the average. I mean you can probably get a functioning car that starts for under $200 or you can spend 50 million plus, most people want a car in the $20-80k range. It's the same thing with the website, I'm not asking for "if I want to spend to infinity or if I want to spend the minimum and get some garbage software that doesn't even work," which should be the assumption.

It's not a matter of thinking I have a USP, it's a matter of building my USP on an axiom that holds true. It is also about crafting other complimentary USPs that take advantage of modernizations that other companies have not taken full advantage of. You can take my word about the 1/1400 or you can even take it as it being a bad idea, but I do know for fact that I do have something unique and I have studied business extensively enough to understand certain innovation tricks used to craft even further enhancements. Obviously an idea is relatively worthless and even more so coming from some random on the internet, but at the same time, we can apply VERY simple logic to modern poker "innovations" going back a decade and ask the following:

1.If spin and gos were a great idea and highly profitable, how come no one wasn't doing a fairly obvious game back before the early 10s?

2.Same question towards Zoom poker.

Both of these were very "obvious" as in spins are just 3 man hyper turbos with a lottery prize pool system and zoom is just regular poker on steroids, yet why did they not appear as soon as online poker came online? Sometimes "obvious ideas" (all great ones) take time to come to fruition.

Tbh even if that were the case which I don't think it would be, if I can make a few 100gs and get online poker to adopt the things I'd like to see, that'd be an awesome win even if they somehow "completely crushed us." Regardless, I have an innovation/entrepreneur mindset, so theoretically (since we're indulging this thought), I don't see why I couldn't continue to come up with new and fresh ideas.

Yeah down the line, although

1.They never happen how you plan them
2.This idea is so far fetched to begin with, it's not going to rely on these questions as much as the validity of the concept itself

As far as Porter goes, I thought his ideas have been discredited in recent times no?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62JBYA6m9Lg

Iirc it was a video similar to this, not sure if that's the one, haven't watched it in a while, although I think you'd find it interesting regardless.

Yes and that's why I posted this thread, I wanted some hard numbers before I went to anyone and I'm sure the people here have the knowledge.

Goodness, no, porter has not been discredited. There are some arguments that Christensson's theories on disruption are more relevant for unseating incumbents, but Porter is entirely still relevant when it comes to the discussion of defending margins.

Good luck to you. I may be a bit cynical (living in Austin and being enmeshed in the entrepreneurial culture there, I heard the same story 'I have new idea that no one else is doing that will change the market' enough times to be a little jaundiced)

More likely you will find more experienced site help HERE.... 2+2 Programming subforum


Maybe HERE ...2+2 Business, Finance, Investing subforum

Fair enough.

Cynicism is probably a good thing considering 80% of businesses go busto in the first 5 years and they're not even in the poker market!

Thanks, will try.

To compete with Stars/888/party?

100 million might be a good starting budget to get things going and make your presence known.

To find out what something costs, a decent first step is to see what people are willing to pay for the businesses you want to compete with. Bwin.party sold for ~$1.5bln last year.

I meant for starting a website up, I highly doubt most poker rooms are investing 10 million+ to startup let alone 100+ million.

I could be wrong though which is why I'd like hard numbers.

Ten million is probably the right neighborhood to go to market

As discussed above, you are not looking for hard numbers, as you have not even remotely defined the necessary parameters for clarifying the type of venture you are proposing. I would say that 10 million is likely the right order of magnitude. Won’t be less than a million, won’t be more than 100 million.

You asked what it would cost to get a product that can compete in the market place.

If you ask about what it costs for you to sell lemonade, the answer would be a couple dollars for water, sugar, lemons, cups. If you want to have a product on the shelf in a significant number of stores, we're talking six figures. If you want to compete with Coke/Pepsi lemonade..

That's why one of the first questions was what you want to do. If you want to compete with the big players, you need big money. Simple as that.

Gambling is a prime example for a market where absurd amounts of money go into marketing your product.

It's a VERY clear venture, an online poker website that functions like the big 3, I did not ask about marketing or anything like that. The title also says START.

The idea was to get a ballpark on licensing, initial staffing and software creation, you're trying to make this some philosophical exercise where because I don't have a 10 year plan for an LARPy idea, I can't ask simple questions about it.

Wrong, I asked what it costs to START.

That's plain wrong, there are many upstart companies that start for very little and end up crushing the market, simultaneously there are all sorts of companies with all sorts of capital that do nothing with it (see Google).

Did Netflix have Blockbuster's budget?

Did Google have Yahoo's budget?

Did Facebook have Myspace's budget?

What you're discussing is long term positioning, competition, not the costs of starting a venture up.

The fact that you think you have been very clear, enough to get a hard number, should be your first warning sign. You have zero of the relevant information required to do anything beyond an order of magnitude estimate. Well, here is your order of magnitude....10 million. I am pretty comfortable that to launch a site functionally equivalent to a mature poker site, with the requisite infrastructure and regulatory requirements met that it would cost not less than a million, not more than 100 million. More accurate than that, you really need a lot more details.

While I don't agree with Madlex that your launch budget has to be equivalent to the market cap or equity value of a mature company, you are sending some awfully odd mixed signals. You want a site functionally equivalent to software and service delivery networks that have been in operation for many years, with, I assume, equivalent capacity and yet you assume you can do this on a boot strap budget. Your comparison's show a fundamental lack of understanding of how those other companies launched, the markets they moved into, or how they raised money.

And, trying to use Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc as a model to follow is roughly equivalent to using a go who bought a ticket and won the mage lottery as an investing model.

I am not trying to dogpile on you, and I can sense you are getting frustrated and defensive. You are essentially asking the wrong questions and wanting nice, tight answer that will validate your dreams. the reality is that it is damned difficult to develop a web based business into a viable product.

I heard on twitter that CoinPoker is raising 5 million for its ICO (whatever that is, I know almost nothing about crypto) in the first instance.
Other sites have invested 5-10 million as startups (usually over the course of a 2- or 3-year plan), while others have spent <2 million when switching networks and building their own clients. There's also a high failure rate. Literally thousands of sites/skins have appeared over the years and then disappeared after 6 months or so, because they couldn't pay the bills.
Note that even getting a 1 year operating licence for a single country can cost upwards of $10,000. There are quite a few big companies that don't operate in several countries because they just don't have enough potential customers to cover the regulatory costs. (Even the monstrous Stars Group has pulled out of some markets because the regulatory fees couldn't be justified by the accountants). Read the NVG thread about Galfond's long-delayed poker site to get a feel for how hard it is to go from zero to hero. It contains some useful info from 'Sciolist' who was head of Unibet Poker when it split off of MGN and went it alone. (Also see the one about "Virtue Poker", or whatever it's called; the one that Phil Ivey is linked to). Online poker is a declining industry. It was always hard to make a success of a new poker site. Right now, it's possibly harder than ever. Good luck though!

I don't think I've been very clear, I think I've been clear enough to get the gist of what I'm saying for those that don't want to turn this into some deep philosophical question or act like because the idea may not happen, I shouldn't get an answer, even if they felt that way, why comment?

Never said service, the whole question at hand was creating the website to begin with and perhaps some initial staff, you're putting words into my mouth. I also never said anything about capacity, why would I want a startup to be able to handle the same volume as heavyweights of the industry?

Nope, you just fail to understand my point again, this is the problem with business schools, they are creating these robotic people trying to follow checklists and formulas without recognizing that at times there are larger questions at hand such as the underlying axioms on which the business is built on.

The point about the other companies had nothing to do with emulation and everything to do with the point that you do not need equivalent funds of giants to become one yourself.

According to you, except the problem is that you approach this as if it were a science (probably due to your heavy investment in schooling which no doubt makes you miss the forest from the trees, kind of how leftists are coming out of school devoid of basic common sense due to their indoctrination), it's not, there are trillions of variables that make cookie cutter outlooks not as valid as they are in actual hard sciences like math or engineering or technology where answers tend to be singular.

The 1st thing I need to know before I can proceed are costs, if the costs are sub 1 million, I can get the money myself, if they are 1-3 million, I might be able to raise it from family/friends, if it goes beyond that and FAR beyond that, I will need to go to other people. This alters what needs to be done in a huge number of ways, however what it does not alter is the following:

Are the underlying assumption(s) or axiom(s) or idea(s) that I'm trying to apply true or false?

If they are, everything else is but a side note that can be figured out later, if they're not, all I'm doing is polishing a turd.

Cool thanks for the information, I will go through the thread again and try and find Sciolist's posts, maybe you can link them if you have them off hand or at least tell me the general vicinity of what part he starts posting?

Thank you, I do appreciate that, it's very much a pipe dream, but I do know for fact that what I'm doing is completely unique (although emulatable, but it would change poker drastically and other sites would have to admit we were right) in the sense that I went through the thread and 1/1400 posts had about 33% of what I was planning on doing.